"Identity" in 20th Century American
Literature
ORGANIZER: Scott McFarland
University
of Illinois at Chicago
mmcfar1@uic.edu
[PART I]
“A Strong Baxterian Flavor: Charles W. Chesnutt and the Poetics of Identity”
Unlike most recent Chesnutt critics, I argue that
his work isn’t critical of the category of race as such, but of the double move
of grounding cultural and moral meaning in racial identity while making racial
identity “invisible” (under the “one-drop rule” legitimated by the 1898 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling). Chesnutt’s point is that to
ground meaning in identity—especially an identity that can only be
“represented”—is really a commitment to meaninglessness, as the meaning of an
action, what a social agent intends, is made irrelevant. Ironically, his most
powerful indictment of these “vulgar theor[ies] of race” turns out to be a
text in which race isn’t even mentioned. In his 1904 story “Baxter’s Procrustes,” Chesnutt illustrates the fallacy underlying
the invisible, “meaningful” racial essence through a ridiculous scenario in
which a literary text, the meaning of which is determined by its author, is
instead treated as an object whose “meaning” inheres in its materiality or in
the identity of its creator. This renders the text, the utterly blank Procrustes that gives the story its name, meaningless both
in theory (since it’s divorced from its satirical intent) and in practice. It
becomes clear that those inherent “meanings” aren’t inherent at all, but
imposed by the group in power—yet still in the name of some essential meaning.
“Meaning” thus becomes a function of political and social power, and the same
thing happens, the allegory suggests, when the “object” in question is not a
literary text but a human being.
Ryan Brooks
University of Illinois at Chicago
rbrook3@uic.edu
“‘The Americas for Americans,’ 'Cuba for
Cubans' and a Neighborhood for Mr. Roosevelt: Pan-American Anti-Imperialism in
the 1930s”
In March of 1933, Roosevelt delivered his First
Inaugural Address, in which he dedicated the US “to the policy of the good
neighbor,” predicated on a “respect” for his and other nations, a respect
founded on what might best be understood as cosmopolitan pluralism. Shortly
thereafter, mounting political unrest in Cuba would inevitably lead to the
expulsion of President Machado, whose dictatorship many believed functioned
solely as a means to perpetuate US economic interests on the island.
Constituting the foundation of Cuban and North American national politics
during the 1930s, this milieu becomes the setting of several texts produced by
authors such as Carlton Beals, Alejo
Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén and Hemingway, as well as the photography of Walker
Evans. Each of these artists, then, is concerned with defining the shape and
content of Cuban national identity; attempting to address questions of class,
neo-colonialism and race, both North American and Cuban authors alike present
aesthetic solutions that, in different ways, mark the limits of representation
and its political efficacy. In this way, Evans’s photographs, which were meant
to serve as a supplement to Beals’s, The Crime of Cuba (1933), will end up
undermining Beals’s narrative, and instead produces a
somewhat disparate, though nonetheless comprehensive, portrait of a nation.
This incommensurability of text and image, moreover, is symptomatic of an
aesthetic that reemerges within Hemingway’s, To Have and Have Not (1937). Similarly, Alejo
Carpentier and Nicolás Guillén’s investment in the nativist
movement, afrocubanismo—indicative of the Carpentier’s novel Ecué-yamba-o and Guillén’s
poetry—imagines the solution to economic and political independence as the
creation of an essentialized national identity,
embodied in Afro-Cuban culture, which nevertheless cannot supercede
the limits of a subject already marked as the racial other. In both Cuban and
North American context alike, insofar as the economic superiority of American
foreign capital remains incontestable, each of these authors seeks to level the
inequality between the two nations through representations of Cuban national
identity, which—I will argue—transforms the disparity between the two nations
into cultural differences and reproduces the logic of cosmopolitan pluralism.
This paper, ultimately, will imagine a means of reading 1930s Cuban and North
American texts and photography as constitutive elements of an indissoluble
whole.
Emilio Sauri
University of Illinois at Chicago
emiliosauri@hotmail.com
“Role-Playing in Tender is the Night: The Cinematic Hero Forecloses the Dandy’s
Class Ascension”
In Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the relationship between popular culture
role models and class ascension, depicting Dick Diver’s performance of the
dandy as an initially successful but ultimately futile means of achieving the
American Dream. Gaining access to an
elite expatriate society through Nicole, his wealthy wife, Dick makes himself invaluable by creating a coherent community through
dandified charm. Unfortunately, Dick
relies on the fickle sympathies of a rich audience to maintain his new class
position, and as such, when their tastes change (from a preference for the
Victorian dandy who rules the private sphere to the twentieth century action
hero who performs publicly on the movie screen), he loses his popularity and,
subsequently, his newly attained class position. Emulating screen sirens, Rosemary, Mary, and
Nicole ultimately gravitate toward men whose dark skin aligns with that of Hollywood’s romantic
hero. Although the cinematic convention
that Rosemary, Nicole, and Mary participate in is a “structure of feeling”
created and produced in American film studios, the relationships that they
portray (and evoke?) cannot exist in America. In Europe,
removed from American racial politics, Rosemary, Mary, and Nicole are free to
misinterpret the cinematic romantic conventions to sanction relationships with
dark men rather than understand them to enforce racist stereotypes.
Consequently, what, at first glance, might seem a revolutionary maneuver in
race relations is simply a class prerogative that will be discarded (like Dick)
with the next “structure of feeling.”
Meg King
University of Illinois at Chicago
mking11@uic.edu
[PART II]
“Certain Dangerous
Intersections”: Carson
McCullers, Deafness, and the Politics of Multiculturalism”
This paper explores the status of deaf subjectivity
in Carson McCuller's 1941 novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Specifically, I suggest that
throughout the majority of the novel, McCullers deploys deafness a metaphor for
the politics of American multiculturalism in the 1930s. Lacking a subjectivity
of his own, John Singer functions not as a deaf subject within multicultural America but
instead as the blank page upon which the novel's disparate minority narratives
are written. Through a close reading of a couple of key chapters, however, I
conclude that McCullers is ultimately committed to critiquing the framework she
has set up. While she initially appears to abstract deafness into a convenient
symbol for multicultural unification, I argue that her final willingness to
destroy Singer's status as a metaphor and imbue him with a deaf (and indeed a
Deaf) subjectivity champions a more intersectional and synthetic approach to
identification and critiques rigid identity-based models of minority
oppression.
Cynthia Barounis
University of Illinois at Chicago
cbarou1@uic.edu
“Invisible Man’s Invisible Black Policemen”
When Ellison’s Invisible Man first arrives in Harlem he has “the shock of seeing a black policeman
directing traffic—there were white drivers in the traffic who obeyed his
signals as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Sure I had heard of
it, but this was real.” However,
despite the fact that IM spends much of the novel on the crowded streets of Harlem, there’s no further mention of black policemen;
somehow the novel manages to overlook the reality
of black cops. (There were thousands of black cops in Harlem
in the 1930s; in 1952, when the novel was published, the NYPD had close to
20,000 blacks on the force.) Why does the text render invisible this
most visible of black figures, and how might the racial coding of the police as
white necessary to Ellison’s conception of black identity? Moreover, how is
this racial coding emblematic of—or opposed to—the civil rights goals of the
black soldiers of WWII, the group most responsible for the dramatic post-war
phenomenon of black police hires throughout the Jim Crow South? Is IM’s sense
of “possibility” at the end of the novel the same as or different than the possibility
that these black veterans saw at the end of the war?
Scott McFarland
University of Illinois at Chicago
mmcfar1@uic.edu
"The Laboring
Immigrant Body: Ethnicity and Class in E. Annie Proulx's
Accordion Crimes"
In Proulx’s 1996 novel,
the little green accordion comes to America in1890 to seek fortune with
its Sicilian accordion maker. Over a century, a succession of Sicilians,
Blacks, Germans, Mexicans, French-Canadians,Irish and Poles give the accordion voice through
laboring the goat-skin bellows and punching the polished bone buttons. Through
each individual player the little green accordion performs the ethnic songs and
styles, but suffers the accidents and abuse that scar the surfaces and interior
mechanisms. It earns the promised fortunes, but is continually bought and sold,
broken and repaired, left for dead, or locked up in pawn and storage. As Proulx’s metaphor for the immigrant
experience, the accordion cris-crosses America several
times always in flux with its body on the line. This paper will examine Proulx’s use of the accordion as an immigrant body that
absorbs the historical Nativist rhetoric, critiques
assimilation and class mobility myths and asserts a performative agency through
the accordion’s repetitive production of song.
JoAnne Ruvoli
University of Illinois at Chicago
jgruba1@uic.edu